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Opting Out Increases Spam?
J. L. Tympanum writes "I used to ignore spam but recently I have been using the opt-out feature. Now I get more spam than ever, especially of the Nigerian scam (and related) types. The latter has gone from almost none to several a day. Was I a fool for opting out? Is my email address being harvested when I opt out? Has anybody had similar experience?"
It *does* show the spammers that the account is active and you're looking at the email...
You don't even need to opt out -- if you leave graphical preview options turned on in your html, the spammers can use uniquely named graphical images to confirm your email address is valid.
True enough. Luckily, Gmail's default is to not download images. And in fact, I think you can't even override that global default - only on a sende-by-sender basis.
Which is great.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
if you leave graphical preview options turned on in your [email], the spammers can use uniquely named graphical images to confirm your email address is valid.
Which is another reason why I hate iphone's mail.app
Yes.
I divide "spam" e-mail into three categories:
For #2 I just use the unsubscribe function. I've asked for the e-mail, it's up to me to tell them if I don't want it anymore. For #1, I report the e-mail as spam through the regular channels. If it hurts a legitimate company's reputation and makes it harder for them to deliver e-mail, maybe they'll think twice about sending e-mail without asking whether the recipient wants it first. I didn't ask for it, I'm not obliged to put extra effort into being nice to them. For #3, I go out of my way to report it as spam in a way that'll cause the worst possible problems for the originator (once I've confirmed who it really came from, if I'm going to go to the trouble of breaking out the big guns I'm not going to let them go to waste on the wrong target and there's plenty of joe jobs out there). Once it's knowing and willful, the Marquis of Queensbury can go pound sand.
Outlook has a cute little bug associated with IMAP folders and using more than one mail client..... Outlook will send a "The email was not read" read receipt if the email is deleted from the imap folder before you've read it in Outlook... even if you tell Outlook not to send read receipts. This is rather annoying if you routinely use an alternative email to delete your spam. The next time you load Outlook it sends out a load of read receipts to the spam merchants, therefore confirming you (my!) email address.
P.S. Check out:
here,
here,
and
here. It's not just me!
return 0; }
...the correct answer is no answer at all.
Opting out or responding to spammers in any way other than silence or bouncing is asking for trouble.
I have a 10+ year old email account that was used all over the place, and now has the dubious honor of getting well over 100 spams per day (unfiltered). I've recently applied the zen.spamhaus.org RBL and a short list of blacklisted domains and keywords (sorry, Mr. Hoodia, I won't be getting your emails). Applying a proper SPF record to the domain has drastically cut down on the non-deliverable backscatter. A couple of times a year, my email address was used as the reply-to address for an entire block of spam and in those cases I'd get hundreds of bounce messages in the course of a few hours. Now it's down to a few now and then, usually from hotmail.
As for opt-out, the remaining spam comes from what look like legit marketers. I definitely did NOT opt in to their list, but once one crooked spammer sells his "double opt-in email list", you're on it for good. The legit marketers send their mail from different domains, but if the spam has a good SPF record, and the opt-out notice goes to the marketing company and not the domain of the sender, I click on the opt-out link. Incoming mail that fails SPF is rejected. No SPF record and I don't opt out. And after a few weeks, I see a negligible amount of repeat email from these marketers, and overall the incoming spam has been reduced over 90%.